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Summary of the Project
The six consortium members consider that in today's mobile world lack of foreign language skills and intercultural know-how represent the greatest difficulties that students encounter when confronting a new study environment.
The aim of this project is to facilitate international mobility for European and non-European students by offering them tools that will help them overcome these difficulties. These tools are specifically adapted on-line language courses and intercultural documents.
Courses will be made available to students, and other university users, via the "Moodle" platform. Moodle is a free, open source LMS which is easy to manage and use. Students can benefit from the courses and intercultural materials either at their home institution, before they leave, or after their arrival at the new establishment.
In order to help both teachers and course developers, as well as student users EMA-4-Moodle will also develop a Moodle language lesson template. This template will facilitate course creation and course use by offering a standardized lesson structure based on the large variety of didactic activities available within the Moodle system.
Greatest beneficiaries of our project output will be students coming to our institutions from abroad. Better language and cultural preparation will allow them to concentrate on their engineering curriculum. As well as students, other members of the institution could also benefit from the course materials, particularly staff in international relations and guest lecturers would find our materials useful. It would also help them to better understand the foreign culture where they might be sending their students.
Language teachers will also reap benefits in that they will be able to create on-line language courses more easily thanks to the template. The template will be useful for course development independent of the language.
With students spending ever more time outside the classroom, on-line courses are in growing demand. EMA-4-Moodle hopes to satisfy this demand, at least in part.
Our long range hopes are that our courses will serve as a model for course developpers outside our institutions, that other teachers will create other language courses that in turn help other students to access other European institutions of higher learning.
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